Long-time Centauri Dreams readers will know that Larry Klaes has been prominent on the site since its earliest days. And for much of that stretch, he’s been writing film reviews, chronicling the story of science fiction movies prominent and sometimes obscure, at a level of detail that turns his articles into serious research tools. I’m pleased to bring Larry’s latest to your attention with this first post under the new ‘Klaes on Film’ tab. The plan is to begin collecting all of his film posts in this section, with the most recent always at the top. I hope you enjoy the new section and, in answer to many email questions, I’ll add that collecting all of Larry’s reviews in a single volume, sold as a separate ebook or paperback, is a project that remains under active consideration.

There once was a highly evolved being who descended to Earth from the heavens, bringing a message of peace and salvation to the unwashed masses of humanity sprawled across their planet. These people reacted to this visitor from beyond their world with a mixture of hope, fear, trepidation, suspicion, and eventually outright hostility.

The visitor made an effort to blend in with the natives in order to better understand them and why they thought and acted as they did…

The year 1979 was a dynamic one. It was the chronological end of the 1970s, essentially the “aftermath” decade of the previous one, the 1960s. Those earlier years saw multiple revolutions on multiple fronts across the globe and beyond that radically changed our society.

One of the bigger “aftermath” effects was with space, both its real and its fictional elements. In the case of reality, although the official Space Age had begun in October of 1957 with the launch…

Ah, aliens. For some humans, they are the conquering interstellar warriors of some tyrannical Galactic Empire. To others, they are angelic saviors just waiting to uplift humanity into the wider Cosmos. To still more, they are aloof godlike beings who are completely indifferent to anyone unlike themselves. If an alien happens to be a member of the Star Trek franchise, the chances are very good they will look, talk, and act very much like a certain primate species of the planet Sol 3 (a.k.a. Earth), with perhaps some variations to the ears…

Science fiction has certainly played an important role in inspiring and influencing humanity’s future directions. The father of American rocketry, Robert H. Goddard, was moved to imagine sending a vessel to the planet Mars as a young man in 1899 after reading The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells published just a few years earlier. From that spark developed a life-long dedicated pursuit of space exploration by Goddard, whose work in turn influenced others which eventually led to real rockets carrying…

When I first heard about the existence of the film Interstellar, I was initially hopeful yet cautious. Most science fiction, especially these days, is some variation on Star Wars, which is often about as scientific and science fictional as the Harry Potter series. Yet Christopher Nolan and his team insisted they were striving hard to stick to REAL science with their production: They even had the famous Caltech astrophysicist Kip Thorne on their side, the very man who convinced none other than Carl Sagan…

When the United States was preparing to send the first humans to Earth’s largest natural satellite in the 1960s with Project Apollo, there were numerous scientists of the day who protested this effort. They felt that knowledge and even surface material could be gathered from the Moon far more cheaply and efficiently with automated probes than with astronauts.

On a technical and pragmatic level, those scientists were essentially correct. But as with many things in human society, the primary reasons for the existence of Apollo were about politics and power…